3
the issuance of marriage licenses to mixed-race couples. Only national in
tervention seemed like
a viable way of eliminating these laws. The first decisive step would take place in the 1960s,
when the US Supreme Court would again have the opportunity to reconsider its 1883 precedent
of Pace v. Alabama, which had declared anti-miscegenation laws to be constitutional under the
Fourteenth Amendment.
In 1963, Florida’s high court heard the appeal of Dewey McLaughlin and Connie
Hoffman, a black Honduran hotel worker and white woman from Alabama who were convicted
of “habitually liv[ing] in and occupy[ing] in the nighttime the same room” as an unmarried
couple (Romano 2003: 188). While their punishment of a 30-day sentence and a $150 fine was
not nearly as severe as it would have been had they been convicted of miscegenation in
Alabama,
3
they nonetheless appealed (Wallenstein 2002: 208-09). Upon the Florida Supreme
Court’s affirmation of the constitutionality of the law on the basis of Pace v. Alabama, they
appealed to the US Supreme Court with representation from the Legal Defense Fund of the
NAACP. The NAACP’s decision that it was time to take up the issue was significant – it had not
participated in earlier constitutional cases, having specifically declined to become involved in a
challenge to Oklahoma’s statute in federal court in the late 1940s (Id. at 183-85).
Like the NAACP, the US Supreme Court believed that the time was ripe to tackle
miscegenation. In 1964, a unanimous Court invalidated Florida’s racially based statute on equal
protection grounds. With regard to Pace, Justice Byron White explained that the case
“represents a limited view of the Equal Protection Clause which has not withstood analysis” (Id.
at 209). The Court’s opinion first dismantled Pace’s endorsement of the principle of superficial
symmetry and then applied a straightforward analysis under strict scrutiny, finding that Florida
had not provided any justification, much less a strong one, for punishing interracial cohabitation
and promiscuity more severely than intraracial sexual misconduct (McLaughlin v. Florida, 379
U.S. 184, 192-93 (1964)). The majority noted that Florida’s specific statute barring
miscegenation (which Florida defined more strictly as intermarriage) could not provide the
required justification, but declined to address the constitutionality of Florida’s law against
miscegenation (Id. at 194). Justices Stewart and Douglas concurred, but argued for a broader
principle that likely would have encompassed laws punishing interracial marriage as well as the
law at issue in the case (Id. at 198, Stewart, J., concurring).
3
Alabamans convicted of miscegenation faced terms of two to seven years in the state penitentiary.
Convention